I love math more than anyone else in the history of the world. Anyone that begs to differ will quickly find out that they're wrong. Seriously. I love math more than words can even begin to convey.

ExperienceProject

I’m not sure how describe what exactly this is other than a stream-of-consciousness that occurred after someone had intellectually stimulated me. It’s been a really long time since anyone has done that. Ah, intellectual stimulation! Even better than sexual stimulation, in my opinion. Knowledge is wonderful, and I love thinking.

This arose after the person brought up God.

To be honest I’m not sure where I was going with this. Such is the nature of Stream-of-Consciousness.

Again, do realize this is directed towards the individual on ExperienceProject who had brought this up, so if things seem odd in the syntax or sounds out of context (I tried avoiding such), that’s why.

—

Here’s how I see arguments.

On the bottom-most tier, we have the completely subjective. Things that are literally impossible to prove due to its very nature. We often call this type of thing “philosophy.” Here we have things like “Is reality really real?” Take nihilism for example. No matter what I do, I can’t be sure if I’m the only conscious being in the universe, and everything I experience and discover is just an illusion produced by a consciousness that is me, and that my senses are mere illusions. This among other entirely unprovables, form the bottom-most tier, and are the absolute most subjective things in “existence” (if existence is really a thing).

Then we have things like the concept of consciousness. We can possibly find out what consciousness is and where it resides in our brain (I actually have a very good idea of what it is. It goes against our current postulate that it has to do with the complexity of the system and instead deals with the ability to have short term memory. To explain would take a while, but I’ve already devised an experiment for it I’ll eventually carry out). We can understand what causes consciousness, but we can’t directly prove consciousness itself. I know I’m conscious. I think therefore I am. But I can’t prove to you, nor you can’t prove to me, your own consciousness. It is very easy to program a computer to say “I am conscious.”

Heck, all you need is these two lines of BASIC:

Print “I am conscious.”

End

And oftentimes you don’t even need the second bit. As AI gets sufficiently advanced, a computer would be able to formulate an argument on its own arguing its own conscious–but it can equally argue and defend that it is an iguana. I personally do believe computers are conscious. Whether it recognizes my presence or understands what I’m doing, or acknowledges my interaction with it at all past “hey, I’m getting some input telling me to do something, I should do that,” is a completely different story, but it has short term memory that’s far more complex than our own (we can barely remember more than a few strings in our short term memory… I often joke about how I have a 2kb RAM), and that lasts much longer. I’m pretty sure short term memory is the key to consciousness in humans (if I do prove this, what will this say about the ethics behind killing someone that literally doesn’t have a short term memory), and it might differ for a laptop due to the difference between the way the short-term memories work, but my main point is that one way or another, nothing can prove consciousness directly even if we can find out where it resides.

On the next tier, we start to drift away from philosophy and more into every day arguments. “What color is better, blue or red?” Even though evolutionarily red is far more a warning color than any other color, and if people are scared of a color (namely me) it’s usually red (although I only fear red lights), there’s no way to truly objectively define which color is better in any meaningful way, as the arguments usually relate to the gestalt principle (imagine three black circles on a white background, each with a 60 degree segment taken out of it in a particular way–or is it that a white equilateral triangle was dropped onto the three dots… there’s no way to tell since it’s what one perceives). Does red look the same to me as it does to you? Do you love or hate the scent of hardware stores? These are arguments that cannot be defined objectively simply because of the seemingly superficial point that everyone experiences this world differently.

Next tier would be something like “Which is better, Digimon or Pokemon?” Now this has a few objective points one could argue to directly show how one’s better than the other, even though it’s a weak argument; however it remains largely subjective. For example, most Digimon are direct rip-offs off of Pokemon, among others. I can’t really think of a reason Digimon would be objectively better in any way to Pokemon, but I’m sure there’s probably one or something. We can see this in how Pokemon takes the world by storm while few know what a Digimon is anymore. Again, a weak argument that is still highly subjective in nature, most of the objective points being how Digimon rips off and attempts to emulate Pokemon. (Objective because it’s a directly provable statement, e.g. in the case of Agumon being a clear rip off of Charmander).

On the next tier we have mostly objective, but somewhat subjective matters, as is in the case of the sciences we know some things about. In this case, we can say something along the lines of “We don’t know all it can be, but we do know what it can’t be.” Take for the instance reptiles. We don’t nearly know all the reptilian species in the world, but we know dragons can’t exist because they violate the laws of physics in so many ways. I could see how something could potentially breathe fire (glands full of flammable liquid that squirts really far and combusts when it reacts with some other chemical or oxygen), but the dragons of fairy tales are clearly impossible (I have a dumbass friend that insists they’re real–that’s why I use this as an example).

Then on the next tier, we have highly objective but hard to completely prove. Evolution is a very good example here. We have a LOT of indirect evidence that shows how species are interrelated and we can directly see natural selection at work, but it’d take several hundred to a thousand millenia to see it at work directly. These are things that do have a very definite answer, and even though we don’t have direct proof of it, one would have to be an utter fool to refute the evidence for a particular stance, unless they themselves provided a direct counterexample to it.

On the next tier we get to the next stage–things that do have a definite, completely objective solution we know little about, like a brand new problem. These can also be arguments that have a finite, discrete, and defined set of possibilities, (i.e. no maybe, and the options are clearly listed and cover all possible outcomes). Here we get into the realm where only math, and occasionally other rulesets (although the entirely objective rulesets are actually at the core nothing more than math that’s been prettied up). Take Fermat’s Last Theorem. We now think Fermat never did have a proof, but just postulated it and leave mathematicians figure it out. It left mathematicians scratching their heads for three centuries, and at long last in ’94 it was solved, with math that was unheard of during Fermat’s time. In Fermat’s time, we could have equal groups of people with equal evidence pointing in both directions stating “Yes, there is a solution” or “No there is no solution.” Here we take sides on things that are absolute truths that don’t even need the universe to exist to hold true.

On the next tier, we have absolute objective truths that have massive evidence for one side, but there’s still reasonable and quite possible ways for it to be the other. Take for example, the Collatz Conjecture. Most mathematicians think it holds true. The Collatz Conjecture is dauntingly simple of a question. Pick any whole number greater than 1. If it’s even, divide it by two. If it’s odd, triple it and add one. You’ll get a new number. Repeat it over and over again, and you’ll eventually reach 1. Even a second grader could understand it, but it’s a problem that’s been evading mathematicians for so long, and it’s on the Clay Institute’s “Top Most Wanted” list, with a million dollars and a medal for its head, proven wrong or right. Most evidence points to it being true, but just one counterexample could prove it wrong. We know it holds for all such numbers up to a billion, but it is very well possible that, say, 18478347529347523984 could prove it wrong (now I need to see what the Collatz trajectory for that is out of curiosity, but most online ones only accept 12 digits… eh it’s not hard at all to code this… I’ll do such).

Then on the topmost tier, you have the proven absolute truths. There is no denying these truths are the truth, the truth, and nothing but the whole truth, and these are truths that not even the bottom-most tier will affect–even if literally nothing exists, math would still exist because it is conceptual, and concepts are information that can apply to reality but don’t necessarily need reality to exist to hold true. To say these truths are not the truths would be one of the most idiotic things to do, as there’s absolutely no way for these truths to be false by definition. Everything, anything, and things that we don’t even have words for or could even conceive of–very literally EVERYTHING, even nothing–pure nothingness, that which literally is not anything which if we put a name to would be something, breaks down to being set theory, in some cases, paradoxically. Paradoxes do not violate logic–they instead create a logical latch. “The previous statement is true. The following statement is false.” Logical latches can be physical, too–they’re absolutely necessary parts of computer hardware, actually. But everything in this top tier is absolute PROVEN truth, and anything in this tier has a definite answer, and it is literally impossible to disprove it. Things in this tier include the Pythagorean Theorem, proof of irrational numbers, proof that some infinities are bigger than others (Cantor’s Diagonal Proof, and Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel Scenario, if you’re interested).

I guess I could call the bottom-most tier Tier IX and the top most tier Tier I and such. They’re roughly categorized by a combination of how easy it is to prove something, how objective it is, and how much we currently understand of it. I’ve arranged it in such a way that the higher the tier number, the more acceptable it is to pick sides given one has a substantiated logically-sound argument (i.e. “Red is the best color because it just is” does not work, and even in Tier II even if something is highly likely to be true, you can’t just say something like “The Collatz Conjecture is true because it just is.” Also, the argument has to be logically sound–even if the argument ends up proving false, it is possible for it to still be logical in its own extent, if that makes any sense). Do note that certain arguments can change tiers, except for Tier IX and Tier I arguments by definition. It is very rare for anything to change more than one or two tiers, and it’s only in the case for tiers that differ solely in our level of understanding. For example, if the Collatz Conjecture gets proven, it becomes a Tier I truth, and permanently stays that way. For all but the top three tiers, Tier IX arguments affect them and deconstruct them into arbitrary nonspecifics, but it breaks them down in such a way that would make any position meaningless to our existence (or non-existence, or some superposition of such). If we don’t exist, or if I’m the only one that exists, what does it matter whether red or blue is the superior color? With the top three tiers, i.e. absolute truths i.e. mathematical truths, because mathematics is the absolute most meta (to define how meta or to continue the sentence using a reference point or adjective or similar would be to attempt to define the nature of reality; the best I can do is define these using layman terms to be independent of whatever it is this all is).

The “truth” of religion is a Tier IV argument that very heavily favors religion being false, due to how contradictory and illogical it is. However, the pure concept of God i.e. there being a penultimate creator (penultimate to mathematics itself, as the God itself, being an entity, would still be defined by a set of rules that which is the absolute truths of mathematics–i.e. the true “God” is literally maths) is a Tier III argument that we have insufficient evidence to neither prove nor disprove.

—

Here’s the slightly shorter TL;DR version of all of this applied to religion as objectively as possible. Such does not necessarily reflect upon my exact beliefs, but instead is based on how possible something is from an objective viewpoint based on our current understanding and pure logic:

Is religion the truth (including any and all ideas that we actually mean something in this universe and that any God, if one exists, interacts with us in any meaningful way in our perspective)? No, it’s self-contradictory, far too variant, highly illogical, and goes against objective reality. If reality doesn’t exist, then it wouldn’t matter one way or another. We have sufficient counterevidence against religion. Is God as nothing more than a creator, the truth? We can’t be sure about that, although we’re pretty sure the God(s) don’t really give a crap about us or is anything like we’d perceive them to be from statistical reasoning alone. God could easily be nothing more than a conceptual necessity of reality, or could be a physical entity comparable to a programmer with varying motives. I could go quite in depth into the topic of “Assuming God exists and created this universe, what is it, what was its motives in creating the universe, what is it observing, etc. etc.” What does God look like? Could be anything. Some weird alien, something we can’t describe, a space unicorn monkey toad–whatever it is, it has statistically no chance of looking anything remotely human. Any one thing I describe has statistically no chance of even remotely describing what a God would look like. The statement “God built us in his image” can be directly proven false. We are imperfect. If God built us in his image, then God must be imperfect. Because by definition, God is perfect, then God cannot look like us without being imperfect i.e. it would not be God, as it would be imperfect. It is sometimes fun to picture God as a vagina, as many would argue that vaginas are the epitome of perfection, haha! Hey, intellectuals can make sex jokes too!

The extremely TL;DR version of THAT:

Is religion the truth? Nope because it goes against logic.

Is God as nothing more than a creator the truth? We’re not sure.

Well, that’s my two cents on this. Yes, two cents–this only scratches the surface of all I could say on this.

—–

To be even more meta, I suppose this argument is a Tier V style argument. I try to be as objective as possible all the time, and I suppose I was slightly less objective in this case because the length of the post happened on accident, and I didn’t completely add in all I could have to each stance so some things seem undefended, and went off on many tangents.

I suppose these Tiers are more along the lines of a cross between Classes and Types, although since they are somewhat ordered, “Tier” isn’t too wrong of a term to use.

I wrote this in response to someone saying that it doesn’t matter whether God exists or not–it doesn’t hurt to try to pray (for my cat). He said this in a more existential way, so I didn’t hesitate on my pedanticism. He seemed alright with my short answer of “God doesn’t exist. Heaven doesn’t exist…” (truncated), so I wrote a lengthy response:

Humans have invented the gods. The majority of Gods were invented at a time when we knew little to nothing about how our surroundings worked and what is possible or impossible. We created our own little explanations to how things may work. We do that today too–I used to think that all black holes were interconnected in some form. Looking back on it with more knowledge about black holes, I see now that my idea was dumb. But say we didn’t know anything about black holes–that they were just discovered. Then this idea would have been considered seriously, even if it is but malarkey now. The same goes with alchemy. Before we knew anything about atomic theory, the idea of turning lead into gold may not have been far-fetched. Of course we look back onto it as malarkey now.

In the past, the idea of a God-driven chariot tracking across the sky being the Sun didn’t seem too far-fetched. We didn’t really have a method to be so sure exactly what a star was, nor did we have a method (due to the fact our mathematics wasn’t developed enough to demonstrate such) to show we go around the Sun. We thought the stars were our guardians, and the planets were Gods. We thought the Earth was flat. All of this has since been disproved by science–but at the time in the ancient world, did we really have a method to do these measurements? Not at all; telescopes weren’t invented until the time of Galileo to peer at the wandering dots in the sky (the word “planet” means wanderer), to see what they really are. Until we could sail across the seas, we couldn’t really understand the curvature Of the earth.

My point is that God theory would have been acceptable back then. Any theory would have been acceptable. Without science or sufficient mathematics to explain the natural world’s behavior, we would have jumped to the conclusion that “this world is too complex not to have a creator.”

If a theistic God really did exist, then every religion would have the exact same set of rules–every representation of God would look alike. There would effectively be only one religion–one that didn’t evolve. Religions like Hinduism and Paganism are wildly different from the Christian/Islam/Judaism faiths. If we analyze the God’s appearance of the many religions of the world, save for Islam (God is represented as a bright, shining light–unfortunately this is where my name derives from, which is why I plan to legally change my Islamic name), almost all of them represent God in a way that God looks similar to that of the followers.

God is a construct of the human mind–an existential defense mechanism created to repress the fact we aren’t but the result of statistics. It’s denial of our insignificance. There are a minimum of one sextillion (1 x 10^21) stars in our observable universe alone, each per capita having about 1.5 planets. From our Kepler observations, we estimate that at least 75% of stars have planets, and at least 22% of those planets are Earth-like. Even then, this is a gross underestimate, as we haven’t been observing the stars enough to detect the slower-period planets, and the potentially smaller worlds that could themselves be Earth-like. If we manage to detect the smaller worlds–both percentages, especially the second one, could shoot up drastically. And what of the red giants? They could have easily in the past harbored planets. What of the moons around those planets? Somewhere, there could be a Pandora-esque world that harbors alien life. The chances of there NOT being a plethora of life elsewhere in the universe is slim to none. Using statistics alone, it’s statistically certain that there is TONS of alien life out there–some of which is as intelligent as if not more intelligent than humans.

We tend to fall victim of an existential observational bias–if we didn’t exist, we obviously couldn’t ponder our own existence. It sounds tautological, but think about it. Say that life exists on five percent of planets in the Goldilocks Zone of other planets (i.e. Earth-like planets have to be in this zone to be considered “Earth-like”). A percent of those spawns of life evolve life capable of existentialism. But if that existential life didn’t evolve the capability to ponder its existence, then of course it wouldn’t. In that sense, we ponder our existence because we’re able to do so. My cat likely doesn’t ponder its existence, as his brain isn’t complex enough to make the connections. If we were all cats, we’d still exist–but we wouldn’t truly think about where we came from.

We fail to realize that we’re just the statistical outcome of that percent of that five percent of that 22% of that 75% of exoplanets out there–and that’s not even counting the exomoons. This alone says that about 1.2*10^17 of planets out there harbor intelligent, existential life on planets, not even counting exomoons. And my percentages may not actually be an overestimate–they may in fact, be a gross underestimate. My point is that there are literally quadrillions, if not more, of spawns of intelligent life in the universe, yet we’re naive enough to believe that our one measly species on one tiny planet around such an average main-sequence star is the entire reason for the existence of this universe, and that for whatever reason, God happens to look like our species, even IF God happened to be a being that cared for all life in the universe. God is perhaps our greatest folly.

Even within the religions, we tend to only look at and believe what we want to hear and believe. Why are Christians so mad over gay people, if gay couples exist in over 470 species? If God was so against gay people, it’d be part of the Ten Commandments. God would be more angry that they committed the sin of wrath against gay people, than of people being gay. And why aren’t Christians so angry about people consuming shellfish? There’s so many discrepancies with all religions everywhere, that it’s almost as if it can’t be real. It’s like living a satire.

Now a “deistic” God wouldn’t be out of the question. Deism would suggest that there IS a God that kickstarted our universe, but doesn’t really care to intervene with anything. I’ve used the analogy of Conway’s Game of Life and other cellular automata before, which seems to work decently. God wanted to simulate an entire universe. It decided upon the rule by which the universe behaves, and the time between generations (one Planck time). This is what we would refer to as our “Theory of Everything.” This rule essentially allows everything to propagate outwards and clump into small groups that behave in particular ways. If I could tell you what this rule is, I’d be rich and famous, as I’d have figured out the Theory of Everything (which I do in reality think relates to cellular automata). God lets this universe play out for about 2.3e62 (If I remember my calculation correctly) generations (that is, the universe’s age in Planck times). Now we represent only a teeny, tiny fraction of this–we as planet Earth.

But would this deistic God really put all of its time and effort into pleasing specifically this one tiny species on this one tiny planet among the 1.2e17 other spawns of intelligent life? The chances of that, in sigma, are so tiny, that my calculator can’t process this (the number is THAT tiny, and it can handle numbers of as small as e-999 to e999… e100 is a googol, just for some perspective). At the same time, do you really think that the God would listen to the cries and pleads of all the spawns of life–and that’s just the existential intelligent life–in the entire universe? This is assuming it knows what life looks like. In Conway’s Game of Life lingo, we’re like gliders. We’re statistically so common-place in the universe, that no God would be sane enough to keep track of one particular glider out of the quadrillions that make up the system. It likely just sits back and observes the universe to see what happens, much like I sometimes play with the rules in an automata simulator to see the result. It might run this immense simulation as a means of finding out the chances of life’s spawn. Perhaps some other spawn of life had figured out the Theory of Everything and perfect quantum computing, and managed to simulate our own universe–i.e. the universe is self-contained. This makes more sense than religion, at least.

But as long as we’re talking existential philosophy, I’ll link you to something I made before. It’s a narrated version of something I wrote a while back:
youtube.com/watch?v=J9F37rVAu_0 [edit: link truncated to avoid embedding]

What does this all have to do with the death of my cat? My cat’s not going to any heaven. Once he dies, he’s dead. He’s an inanimate object. He’s nothing more than an organic tetranary supercomputer that’s no longer used. So much sadness… but does my sadness mean anything to the rest of the universe? No. I don’t bother to pray for something that’s pretty much statistically certain not to exist in a way that would actually help.

I could go on and on and on about why God doesn’t exist, but I think this is enough for now…

Someone asked a question on EP wondering if they’d understood the universe from the Big Bang to the present day. There were a few flaws in his thought process, but instead of trying to… hang on, it’s 11:11PM on 11/11 heh heh… correct individual parts, I thought I’d just start from the very beginning and elaborate as much as I felt like concentrating. One could go very, very, very in depth with this, but then it gets too long and uninteresting as part education, part philosophy, and part humor.

This is basically the story of my life from the VERY beginning… only I don’t really elaborate on my conscious life as much.

I could go into the Multiverse and Parallel Universe and Many Worlds hypothesis and state what might have happened before the Big Bang, and other possible nuances in what could have happened afterwards, but hey, I was just having a little bit of fun with this, How-The-Universe-Works style!

Wooo #spaceweek!

The Big Bang was more of a huge expansion than an explosion. It created pure energy–equal amounts matter and antimatter that for the most part annihilated each other. Why matter reigns is a big problem in cosmology. We think that there’s an antimatter universe twin somewhere across the universe. Once the universe was cool enough to start making bonds, energy converts into mass (because E=mc² allows this to occur), and starts making primitive subatomic particles, which in turn start making electrons, protons, and neutrons, forming primarily hydrogen atoms and such. With all this hot gas swirling around, many enormous stars formed, living fast and dying young with the true bangs of the universe, far more explosive even than a hypernova (which is itself more explosive than a supernova). This creates many black holes, which then eat each other up to form supermassive black holes, which become the seeds to start forming galaxies. Hot gas starts swirling around these seeds and form the protogalaxies in which solar systems start to form. Each star starts off as a swirling mass of hot gas. This begins to have some gravity, which pulls the gas closer together and pulls in even more gas. This creates an even more massive cloud with even more gravity, and even more gas is pulled in. This keeps going on until the gravity causes enough pressure at the core of the protostar to ignite fusion. Fusion starts colliding hydrogen atoms together to form helium atoms, in the process releasing radiation, and this star burns for millions to billions of years–a battle between the intense gravity pulling the star together, and the intense fusion pushing it outwards–before finally running out of fuel. After the star uses up all its hydrogen, it starts fusing together helium atoms. Once all the helium atoms are fused together to form carbon, it starts burning the Carbon. It eventually gets to a point where it creates iron. Iron is the most lethal thing to a star, since it requires an *intense* amount of energy to fuse it. The star keeps pouring in energy into the iron atoms, but it doesn’t give. Once it produces iron, it has only seconds to live. With no more fusion to fuel the star’s fusion reactor, the battle between gravity and fusion ends. Gravity always wins. The star’s dead before it even hits the ground. In the final moments of the dying star, the star’s core shrinks to a size that’s less than a thousandth of its original size. This creates an incredible amount of energy in which the stars eject two powerful beams of gamma ray energy–its death cry (sometimes the birth cry of a black hole)–out of its sides. In this few second release of energy, iron fuses together and forms heavier elements, and so on. The energy released in this moment is more than the star will have ever outputted in its entire lifetime. This is known as the gamma ray burst, and while this death ray hurtles through the universe, blasting gas and stardust all around, leaving a nebula behind. This stardust contains the heavier elements needed to create life. Sometimes the star leaves behind a neutron star, others, a white dwarf, and others yet a black hole. From this cloud of dust and gas, a new star can be born from the unused hydrogen. The process repeats. This time, when the clouds of gas and dust circle around the protostar in order to create the new star, the heavier elements are flung outwards in an accretion disk. These tiny particles eventually collide-but don’t necessarily fuse–with each other, which, over time, builds up to form mini asteroids, which continue to build up. Eventually a proto-solar-system is born, in which there’s but chaos throwing planets around left right and center. Over billions of years, this system stabilizes. One of these planets was the right distance from its star–its Goldilocks zone, and collected the right elements from its surroundings. It was in perfect conditions to avoid asteroid collisions and collected the most amazing chemical in existence–dihydrogen monoxide, more affectionately termed as water. This, along with carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous, and a little zap of energy, created the first amino acids–the first organic molecules. Eventually, these amino acids arranged themselves into a particular pattern–RNA, surrounded by a protective phospholipid bubble–the first cell. Gradually, over time, these cells became more complex, eventually forming the first prokaryotic cells–bacteria. These became ever more complex, creating eukaryotic cells. From this stemmed the process of evolution, the ever fractally branching process of a genetic algorithm that either survives or doesn’t, allowing only the best of the generation to go on. Replication isn’t a perfect process, causing small mutations per generation, that can either help or debilitate the species as a whole. Eventually there’ll come a time when the species branches into a completely different species… with enough time, due to Chaos Theory, the tips of the tree will be vastly different. One of these paths involved one branch of the bacteria evolving into strange aquatic creatures, which one branch evolved into fish, which one branch evolved into amphibians, which one branch evolved into a rodent-like mammal, which one branch evolved into the first primate, which one branch evolved into ape-like primates, which one branch evolved into the hominids, which one branch evolved into the homo-sapiens, which has since evolved into a better developed version of the homo-sapiens (homo sapiens sapiens), which became us today. These humans originated in Africa, from which they migrated to different locations as the earth’s plates shifted and such. One such group migrated to India, and generations later, developed civilization. Further civilization by other humans (the British) developed certain areas in a certain way. Two of these humans in a developed area arranged a marriage between two individuals that after having one son later migrated to the United States in Minnesota, and had a daughter. After a few years, they moved to Orlando, and the daughter grew up there, facing severe bullying but learned to develop apathy, as she fell in love with math and science, and learned not to care about what other people think. Over time, she fell in love with cosmology and mathematics in particular, and loved teaching such. Having joined a site called ExperienceProject, she then vowed to educate people as much as possible. One day, she stumbled across a question that involved the origin of the universe, and she started typing a self-referential wall of text, of which she can’t say anything more since it hasn’t happened yet. All this to remind you that she and everything around her is literally stardust, since everything around her and herself at an atomic level was forged in the belly of a star.

This post is very recent.
All I can think of saying is that I just let things go in this one, and just went on and on and on, because it was, after all, a stream of consciousness to try and explain all that goes on in my head (and what better way to do that than stream of consciousness).

Original Post Date: October 11, 2014
Original Post: http://bit.ly/1vjqEAz

Sometimes I’ll get a reply to a post, which I reply back with what starts out as a long comment, then ends up being too long to post as a comment, so I decide to post it as an experience, and allow it to be as long as it turns out to be.

When I do that, I’m essentially typing up a stream-of-consciousness, where I type whatever comes to my mind at the time, even if it seems like I’m jumping from topic to topic, and then eventually reach a conclusion that sums up everything I’ve mentioned through all the verbosity and redundancy and inconsistency of the text just to make it appear consistent while having definite deliberation as does the rest of the passage.

This is perhaps the longest passage I’ve ever written for EP, and I’d particularly like you to pay attention to the very last paragraph at the least, if this is TL;DR for you.Continue reading “Think”→

Far fetched asking about topology on here, but there might be someone that knows. Posting this onto a specialized group might get specialized attention, though I doubt.there are topologists on here…

For a given n-space, does n have to be an integer? I can see how an n-manifold doesn’t necessarily have to be an integer (as is in the case of fractals), but can a fractal-dimension k (in essence, a non integer, positive or negative, dimension) be expressed as a k-space? If a k-manifold “Flatlander” were to exist in a k-space, would it perceive itself on a flat plane with no discontinuity? How would k-manifolds behave in other non integer m-spaces? If k>m, then what would happen? Would it be like in Flatland, how a three-sphere passing through two-space would look like a circle with changing diameter, except without a smooth transition? What does the m-manifold look like to a k-manifold in k-space? In m-space? Is there even a branch of topology concerning fractal manifolds in fractal dimensions? If not, I must create it. But… ahhh so many questions that I want answered!

Well, NOW I know what a manifold is. Stupid me. Most fractals aren’t manifolds. Most fractals are anything but locally Euclidean! But I mean, at the time, I was just learning about topology. It’s fun to reply to the “Ask me anything” questions with “Define a mathematical manifold using only two words.” No one is yet to answer with “locally Euclidean.”

I’m reposting the posts I posted on ExperienceProject onto this blog.
Some of the information in this is factually incorrect, but I’ve since learned.
I never did get around to updating it.

Original post date: November 26, 2013

Note: I’m also including various comment replies (with their usernames censored, of course), since I’ve generated some very long comment threads with this.

Chaos Theory And Philosophy

***Note***
I need to update this story. My arguments are weak and there is some inaccurate information. I will eventually post a stronger and better argument.

What is your opinion on free will? Chaos Theory dictates that randomness does not exist. Doesn’t that mean free will doesn’t exist? Everything is predetermined. But then we have to argue about the Uncertainty Principle. Is it truly random? Or is it quasirandom? If the Uncertainty Principle is truly random, then the universe would be over-run by chaos. It seems as if the universe is governed by a fractal-based ToE equation–a recursive fractal-esque formula. With any mathematically-generated formula, there is no “true” random. It seems that, if the Uncertainty Principle is not truly random, there can’t be free will. Even so, how can we be sure the Uncertainty Principle is random or not? We live in a universe governed by it, and you can’t take a measurement of a set from within the set itself. You can approximate the set, but you can’t make accurate measurements (you are bounded by the limits of the set). Unless we were an outside observer, we would never truly know whether or not the Uncertainty Principle is truly random. It may seem random, but there’s a set order to the chaos (Chaos Theory and fractal geometry). Everything, in this case, would be predetermined. What does that mean for our judgement and ethics? Doesn’t that give reason for everyone to do what they please (because it was their fate to do so? If we get answers that point towards “fate” (quasirandom outcomes), wouldn’t that alter our better judgement (even though we were “destined” to do so) and cause us to make rash “decisions” (even though the outcome was predetermined)? Chaos Theory raises many philosophical and ethical arguments. What’s your take on all this?

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